a chronicle of my coding discoveries

Useful Terms while Tackling Learn.co

The difference between the Flatiron School’s free learn.co lessons and other free online resources to learn coding is that learn.co requires you to use the tools and software that a professional would. Getting comfortable in the environment is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but I definitely found it confusing and intimidating at first. Here are some terms I’ve run into and become familiar with recently:

Console/Terminal: From Wikipedia, “A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system.”

Shell: From Wikipedia, “In computing, a shell is a user interface for access to an operating system’s services. ”

IRB: stands for Interactive Ruby, a REPL where code is typed in a command line and immediately executed.

Mocha: From the Mocha website, “feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser.”

Debugger: From W3Schools, “The debugger statement stops the execution of JavaScript, and calls (if available) the debugging function. Using the debugger statement has the same function as setting a breakpoint in the code.”